Last year, readers nominated dozens of forlorn bus stops to call attention to the daily indignities and dangers that bus riders have to put up with. This sad, windswept patch of grass between two highway-like roads in a St. Louis inner suburb took the prize.

We’ve been hearing from readers and transit advocates who want another shot to name and shame the public agencies who’ve let bus stops go to seed. So the Sorriest Bus Stop competition is back. (If you have a great bus stop you want to recognize, don’t worry, we’ll cover that in a different competition later this year.)

We’ll be doing the contest as a Parking Madness-style, 16-entry single elimination bracket. Below is an early submission from downtown Austin and reader Chris McConnell, who says, “This has to be the saddest #busstop in Austin. It has no shade, no seating, and no stop ID for checking times. AND it’s at the main transfer point downtown. FAIL.”

And that got us thinking… Caption contest! Give us your entry in the comments and we’ll choose a winner.

As an aside, it seems like slapping a ped/bike path next to a highway is a real trend these days, even though no one really wants to walk or bike a few feet away from noisy traffic moving at 65 mph. This path is a clear example of greenwashing by a state agency that wants to show people it’s “multi-modal” without making any meaningful shift in values or priorities.

We asked you to point us to the nation’s worst bus stops and you answered. After receiving dozens of nominees from our readers, Streetsblog editors narrowed the pool down to eight very sorry bus stops.

These bus stops are ugly. Ugly! In a transportation system where public agencies never seem to lack the money for $800 million interchanges or $2 billion highway tunnels, bus stops become an afterthought. Many of these contenders are situated in the midst of car-oriented development without so much as a sidewalk or bench nearby, let alone a shelter. To make transit dignified and comfortable, we need to do better.

Help us crown America’s sorriest bus stop by voting below. Here are the contestants:

Pennsylvania Avenue in Forestville, Maryland

This entry comes to us from author and transit advocate Ben Ross. This is the same Pennsylvania Avenue that runs past the White House:

Which deserves the distinction of being named the “Best Urban Street Transformation of 2014”? We’re starting the voting today and will post a reminder when we run the rest of the Streetsblog USA Streetsie Award polls next Tuesday. Without further ado, here are the contenders:

Western Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Before

After. (We’re using a rendering because the project is not quite 100 percent complete.)

The Western Avenue road diet narrowed dangerously wide traffic lanes on this one-way street to make room for safer pedestrian crossings, a raised bike lane, and bus bulbs. Brian DeChambeau of the Cambridge Community Development Department, the lead agency on the project, adds these details about the redesign:

First prize winner: “Blizzard 2013” by Todd Consentino

This photo is from February 2013, when Boston had just been slammed with 24 inches of snow in 24 hours.

“Most of the roads by us were a mess and there weren’t many non-plow type vehicles on the road,” said Todd. “My five year old daughter wanted to go sledding. Our favorite sledding hill is only four miles away, so we rode our bike. It was awesome! Boston was peacefully quiet.”

UPDATE: Well, this is embarrassing and a little maddening. We have been hacked through our hack-proof captcha coding. So, we’re shutting this sucker down and calling the winners based on voting as of May 10, when the hacking started. We will steer clear of Google polls in the future, and we sincerely apologize to everyone who voted and most especially to everyone who submitted photos. Winners will be announced tomorrow.

Last week, we brought you the best 10 pictures from our photo contest of biking and walking in the rain and snow. They were pretty beautiful, weren’t they? Well, unfortunately, someone got a little too enthusiastic about his or her favorite pictures and hacked the voting over the weekend.

We’ve made a more secure form for our Showers & Snow photo contest and are keeping voting open for a while longer. The final winners will be decided by combining the pre-hack votes with votes cast between now and 5:00 PM on Wednesday, May 14. It’s not a perfect system, we know, but it’s the most fair solution we could come up with.

The new deadline for voting will be 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, May 14. Winners will be announced the next day.

It’s May, but we’re still getting doused with April showers. And it wasn’t that long ago that we were still getting hit with snowstorms too. And you know what? The bikers kept biking and the walkers kept walking — even when cars were stuck in the snow and schools closed down because the roads were supposedly impassable.

We asked our readers to send in their best pictures of biking and walking in the rain and snow, and the results are magical. The hushed winter wonderlands, the soggy but happy rides — great images that capture how active transportation connects us to the elements, even when the elements aren’t at their most favorable.

We need your help to pick two winners in our Showers & Snow photo contest, sponsored by Ortlieb and co-presented by the Alliance for Biking & Walking. Vote below for your favorite picture and the top two vote-getters will win free sets of waterproof Ortlieb panniers and bike bags!

Polls close at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, May 12. The winners will be announced the next day.

This year has dealt us some crazy weather, from the polar vortex to drenching thunderstorms. We know you didn’t hide all winter in a car. You were out walking the walk and riding the bike, whatever the weather. We hope you got a picture of it!

In honor of April showers — and to celebrate the end of an epic winter — we’re co-sponsoring a Showers & Snow photo contest with the Alliance for Biking & Walking and Ortlieb. Send us your gorgeous photo(s) of walkers or bikers in the rain or snow where you live, and you could win a fabulous set of waterproof Ortlieb panniers and bike bags.

Contest details

Photos: Please send high-resolution files (at least 1,600 pixels wide or tall), without watermarks. Please submit no more than 10 photos for this contest. For inspiration, check out the finalists from our last photo contest.

If you are not on Flickr, email your pictures as a JPG or PNG file to photocontest@bikewalkalliance.org, with the subject line “Ortlieb Showers & Snow photo contest.” In the body of the email, provide your name, address, telephone number, email address, and photo caption. Please submit your images in as few emails as possible.

In both cases, if you didn’t take the picture yourself, please let us know who did!

Prizes: First and second prize winners each get a full set of awesome, waterproof Ortlieb panniers and mountable bags to turn your bike into a badass hauler.

An asphalt scar in Rochester, New York, has triumphed over 15 of the world’s worst parking craters to become the Parking Madness 2014 champion.

It was a surprising run. Who would have guessed a couple of weeks ago that this scrappy upstart would prevail over some of the sprawliest, most highway-marred urban spaces in North America? But a devout group of locals, recognizing the advocacy potential, helped push Rochester past Miami, and then Detroit, and then Kansas City, and finally Jacksonville, all the way to the Golden Crater. Quite the Cinderella story.

When we closed voting at 2 p.m. Eastern time today, Rochester was several lengths ahead of Jacksonville, leading 611 to 165. The Rochester parking crater joins last year’s winner, downtown Tulsa, in the annals of Parking Madness infamy.

Here’s the crater that swept to victory:

Kansas City may have had a bigger crater. Detroit’s may have been emptier. But the Rochester crater packed an extra wallop because we also got to see what was lost:

Through 14 matches pitting some of the most hideous parking expanses in the world against each other, two cities are still standing: Rochester and Jacksonville.

These are the worst of the worst downtown asphalt scars. But only one city can claim the Golden Crater, and the teachable moment that comes with it. Now it’s up to Streetsblog readers to choose this year’s champion.